Saturday, January 19, 2008

Human Error, Not Machine

WMUR Manchester reported New Hampshire... is recounting the Democratic votes at the request of candidate Dennis Kucinich. He said that online reports of dramatic differences between communities that hand-counted ballots and those that machine-counted them led to his request.... In many of the towns and wards, the vote counts have been identical. Some minor changes have been made when voters didn't follow directions and marked ballots that were impossible for the machines to read.

The one major exception has been Ward 5 in Manchester, where votes for all the major candidates dropped significantly after the recount. Clinton's total went from 683 to 619, Obama's went from 404 to 365, and other candidates saw similar drops. But state officials said the problem wasn't with the machine that did the counting. The disparity appeared when the ward clerk filling out the official tally sheet accidentally added vice presidential votes to the presidential votes.

The New Hampshire ballot allows voters to also vote for a vice president,
Isn’t that what the 12th Amendment corrected?
and some wrote in a presidential candidate's name in that spot. When the clerk was carrying the totals over from the columns, the votes were accidentally added to the presidential votes. It was a human error, and the machine count was right,
We need to get those unreliable humans out of the loop. The Cylons and the Borg were right.
but that hasn't stopped hundreds of people from e-mailing the secretary of state calling him a "liar," calling the process a "sham," and threatening to have Gardner arrested by federal officials for rigging the outcome.... WMUR attempted to contact Kucinich to get more clarity about what exactly he's looking for
Kucinich is looking for publicity, and he figures it was worth $27,000; he knows he does not stand a chance of getting the nomination.
and whether continue the recount through the entire state, but no one from the Kucinich campaign returned the calls.

Don Surber blogged Diebold 1, Kos 0.... I know, the truth is just a conspiracy to make the left look loony.

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